This will be easiest to fix in the unicode branch. It's on the TODO list there. It's intended to be a short-lived sprinting branch, so I think it's best to leave this to be fixed there and then merged back.

The good news is that on that branch, your fix is absolutely the right idea, although we have some helper functions to make it easier.

Leaving the ticket open so that we remember to ensure it really is fixed.

This was fixed in the unicode branch in [5248] (without changing simplejson.py at all, since that already works well with bytestrings and unicode). I'll close this ticket when the branch is merged back into trunk.

Fixed #1015 -- Fixed decorator_from_middleware to return a real decorator even
when arguments are given. This looks a bit ugly, but it's fully backwards
compatible and all the extra work is done at import time, so it shouldn't have
any real performance impact.

Fixed reverse URL lookup using functions when the original URL pattern was a
string. This is now just as fragile as it was prior to [5609], but works in a
few cases that people were relying on, apparently.

Improved syndication feed framework to use RequestSite if the sites framework is not installed -- i.e., the sites framework is no longer required to use the syndication feed framework. This is backwards incompatible if anybody has subclassed Feed and overridden init(), because the second parameter is now expected to be an HttpRequest object instead of request.path

Fixed #4459 -- Added 'raw' argument to save method, to override any pre-save processing, and modified serializers to use a raw-save. This enables serialization of DateFields with auto_now/auto_now_add. Also modified serializers to invoke save() directly on the model baseclass, to avoid any (potentially order-dependent, data modifying) behavior in a custom save() method.

Fixed #4538 -- Split the installation instructions to differentiate between installing a distribution package and installing an official release. Thanks to Carl Karsten for the idea, and Paul Bissex for the patch.

Fixed #3505 -- Added handling for the error raised when the user forgets the comma in a single element tuple when defining AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS. Thanks for the help identifying this problem, Mario Gonzalez <gonzalemario@…>.